Anna Mieke is back with another sumptuous slice of alt-folk ‘Mannequin’, the third single off her forthcoming album, ‘Theatre’—due out November 18^th via Nettwerk.

As Anna Mike explains ‘Mannequin’ was inspired in part by a Jane Kenyon poem, ‘Otherwise.’ “The first line of the song is one that repeats in the poem. There’s a feeling of being an observer, a witness, of being observed in performance, a play, and the rituals of moving through life. An acknowledgement of things coming to an end, and how nothing is meant to stay the same.

A kind of imagined underworld exists in this song, too: it lives in a hot climate and I imagine a jungle, desert, tropical birds when I hear it. There’s a sort of darkness present: porcelain eyes, staring; blood; being consumed; a gun,” she explains.

“I’d barely finished writing the song and hadn’t practiced it a whole lot when we recorded it, and Matt and Ryan, who play on the live core take, had barely heard it before, so there’s a sort of tension there—a hanging on to an edge. One reference I had for the arrangement of this song was the music composed for ‘Peter And The Wolf’ by Sergei Prokofiev.”

Theatre is now available for pre-order

We tipped Anna Mieke for big things as part of our Plec Picks series for read the interview by clicking the image below.